Has anyone played with GIMP yet? www.gimp.org
I'm thinking I might be able to work with my yearbook students in this program.
Any feedback MUCH appreciated :D

judet

04-02-2010, 06:53 PM

Yep. I use it for both scrapping and designing. It's a great program :)

ccouch

04-02-2010, 09:45 PM

Oh, that's so good to know, Jude. I have been racking my brain trying to figure out what to do to work with these kids on yearbook LOs.

Does GIMP support layered tiffs? I'm not seeing that I'm able to open those in that program.

judet

04-03-2010, 05:24 AM

No, but it does support layered psd's. The only thing is that it won't show any layer styles. You can get an add-on to do layer styles but I don't think you can save them and I know you can't use photoshop styles.

What sort of thing do you want to do? Is it templates that you want to use for the yearbook?

jomi

04-03-2010, 07:55 AM

I used it for m,y digital scrapping course when I worked at a scrapbook store. It's a great alternative for Photoshop and once you can make the switch it easy to use :)

ccouch

04-03-2010, 01:28 PM

Yeah, I want to give the kids templates to use for the yearbook pages. I will take care of the harder pages (individual student portraits by grade with names), but I want the kids making the "collage" pages and the separate event/club pages.

I can create some .psd templates and let them play around with them. I looked for some tutorials last night & what I was finding was that you couldn't use a layer clipping mask like you can in PS with a template, but that you have to actually delete part of the picture outside of each template layer. Do you have any advice for that? Is there an easier way to do it?

judet

04-03-2010, 03:10 PM

Yeah it doesn't work quite the same. You can use layer masks to have the same effect, but its probably more straightforward to delete the excess.

If the shape you want to clip to is a simple rectangle the second lot of steps can be changed to :
Layer --> Crop to Selection

Try that and see how you get on. I know it looks like a lot, but it's really pretty quick. I think GIMP and photoshop work quite differently, but once you get used to where things are its fine. I know I couldn't make head nor tail of PSE when I tried it!